Arista courts container, white box infrastructure data centers

Arista Networks is aiming to woo the white box datacenter crowd with a container-friendly version of its networking operating system and support from the likes of Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Microsoft Azure Networking.

The networking company, which is competing with the likes of Cisco in enterprise accounts, launched its Containerized EOS (extensible operating system) in a move that aims to win over development and operations teams as well as fans of container technologies such as Docker.

In its statement on EOS and containers, Arista wasn’t shy about pitching white box hardware players that’ll be attending the Open Compute Project Summit in Santa Clara. Arista said:

Arista customers can utilize cEOS in tandem with industry standard white box hardware and enable a wide array of tools and applications from the container ecosystem. This marks the first software offering of EOS for white box switches and servers.

Courting white box customers such as major cloud providers isn’t new. The fastest growing segment in the server industry are no-name systems. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise has played along with the white box market. Arista is acknowledging that no-name networking gear is also having a big impact.

Arista is also aiming to extend its software footprint beyond its hardware. Arista’s Containerized EOS runs in a container on multiple hardware and cloud operating platforms, supports apps running within workspace or as virtual machine, and supports discovery and provisioning of services.

Arista delivered $1.13 billion in revenue in 2016 and is projected by Wall Street to have $1.42 billion in sales in 2017.